1. Field of the Invention.
The present invention relates to a holder for disposable underpads for incontinent persons and is particularly suitable for use in hospitals. The underpads have the ability to contain excess excretion from an occupant of a bed and thus prevent the excretion from dirtying sheets and ruining mattresses.
2. Description of the Prior Art.
It is well known that persons confined to a bed, namely, incontinent persons, are often unable to control bodily excretions. Said excretions dirty sheets, causing the changing of sheets and a correspondingly higher frequency of laundering. These functions are labor intensive, are very expensive, and inconvenience the patient.
In addition, continued wetting of the sheets eventually causes the mattress to be ruined irrespective of plastic and/or rubber covers on the mattresses. This all caused undue and unnecessary economic hardships on hospitals and institutions as well as on individuals.
Prior to this invention, some solutions have been proposed to solve these problems. However, for one reason or another, these prior art proposals left something to be desired.
Industry has developed disposable underpads made of highly absorbent materials to collect the excretions. These disposable underpads generally come in several sizes. A problem with these pads is that they are moved around and become dislodged from under the patient thus defeating their intended purpose. The larger disposable pads covering a larger area are somewhat helpful in this respect; however, there is an increasingly and corresponding higher cost and they still move about the mattress. Today in hospitals and institutions, all means are being used to lower costs.
Therefore in practice hospitals and institutions order the smaller sizes to save money. At bedside however, the attendant will often use more than one disposable underpad to cover the mid-portion of the bed, because of the movements of the patient causing the underpad not to be in the right place at the right time. Of course, this procedure again causes waste.
U.S. Pat. No. 4,064,577, issued to Ronald D. Walters on Dec. 27, 1977, shows an improved bedding drawsheet having a textile base portion 26, large enough to tuck around and under the sides of a mattress 14, a panel 28 which is bonded to the base portion, and a removable moisture absorbent pad 32, attached to said panel 28 using VELCRO, registered trademark, attachment means. The latter attachment means provides bumps at least 1/8 inch thick which annoys a bed occupant. Furthermore, VELCRO.RTM. attachment means must be applied in two strips along aligned elongated areas in the interfacial surfaces between the underpad and the underpad holder. It is an expensive and impractical technique to apply VELCRO.RTM. attachment means in the precise alignment needed and also, it is difficult for hospital personnel to align the VELCRO.RTM. means properly because one of the two strips to be aligned is always invisible to the person replacing a disposable underpad. In addition, the base portion 26 of the Walters device is of textile material that is too expensive to be disposable. Therefore, the textile base portion 26 must be laundered when dirty before it can be reused for another patient.
U.S. Pat. No. 3,646,624 to Frederick W. Zipf III issued on Mar. 7, 1972, discloses a plastic drawsheet 14 having an absorbent portion 22 secured by adhesive 24. Mr. Zipf's device does not easily accommodate changing of the water absorbent portion, if at all. Furthermore there is heat build-up caused by the plastic drawsheet. The present invention uses industry standard disposable underpads, which are quickly and easily changed without the need for adhesives.
French Pat. No. 403,237 to Vialard discloses a rubber pocket fully open in its upper median part so that a disposable absorbent cloth may be laid out flat between its edges and its bottom. However, Vialard requires a pair of safety pins at each of the four corners of the pocket to secure the cloth to the pocket. The use of pins is unacceptable under any patient in the medical field. Furthermore, the pins must be removed before a soiled disposable cloth can be removed from the pocket and a fresh cloth must be pinned to each corner of the Vialard pocket to be considered secured. Such pinning and unpinning is inefficient and annoying to hospital personnel.
Other methods show plastic sheets, which create a build-up of body heat causing the skin to break down resulting in decubitus ulcers forming on the patient's body. This is the result of a lack of air circulation. The present invention eliminates the heat build-up by placing openings in the base sheet to circulate air.
Other patents describing the closest subject matter provide for a number of more or less complicated features that fail to solve the problem in an efficient and economical way. None of these patents suggest the novel features of the present invention.